1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a system and method of selection of a consensus from a collection of ideas.
2. Background
Fundamentally, it is hard for a useful consensus to be extracted from a group. There are many instances in which a collection of people needs to reach a consensus regarding a particular issue. The issue may be anything that can be voted on, such as a candidate to be chosen from among a group of candidates, or a pressing issue that needs to be put forth by the group in a representative manner. For very small groups of people, this may be relatively straightforward, and may result from a dialogue among the people within the small group.
However, for groups larger than about ten people, finding a consensus becomes much more difficult. Direct discussion among the group members becomes unwieldy and awkward, and an exchange of ideas that may be simple in a group of five people becomes onerous for a group of 100. In addition, even in small group, the majority of the discussion may be lead by a relatively small number of participants.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a method of selecting an idea or forming a consensus, which works for both large and small groups of people.